Presentation - Introduction to Lua

Lua is a stunning little language. I held a presentation about it around two years ago. As I thought it might be generally useful I translated it and made it available here. There are also some code examples you might find interesting.

Packt 2010 Open Source Awards

Packt Publishing just announced their annual Open Source Awards contest recently. I thought it might be nice to plug this particular contest as they decided to expand it a bit for this year. Instead of just the traditional categories for CMS projects they provide a few new ones this year.

It looks like there are prizes (Kindles, yay!) available for some lucky people participating. You can find more information about the contest at the announcement and the project nomination page.

Book Review - Python 3 Object Oriented Programming

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher, Packt Publishing.

I will be taking a look at Python 3 Object Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips this time. I tend to think that I'm fairly proficient with the OOP concepts yet I decided to delve into the book just to enforce my thinking and learn a bit about specifics of Python 3. I think the book managed to do this more than well.

Instead of doing traditional good/bad/ugly type of review I will take a look at the book chapter by chapter and finally recap the main findings in verdict.

HTML5 Canvas Gradients - Triangle Gradient

This time I'm going to show you how to render a gradient using triangle vertex colors. In case you have played around with OpenGL, DirectX or some 3D graphics application you might be familiar with the expected result already.

Before delving into the code I will explain the math behind the approach chosen.

qDemo - Demonstration Generator for jQuery

I just came up with a simple plugin for generating demonstration pages for jQuery plugins. A demonstration page contains plugin options, code corresponding to the options and the plugin itself. This makes it possible to modify plugin options in real time and see how they affect the result.

I developed the plugin to make it easier to document qColor, a palette plugin in development. It sort of grew out of the project as I thought it might be useful as a component of its own. I think the plugin provides interesting alternative to static text based documentation. It probably cannot replace it altogether, though.

You can find the plugin and some initial documentation here.

Book Preview - Python 3 Object Oriented Programming

I will be reviewing Python 3 Object Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips in a few weeks. At least if the sample chapter, Python object-oriented Shortcuts, is to be believed the book should not provide much of a challenge.

I expect that the book has most to offer to people new to object oriented concepts. I'm particularly interested to see how it manages to bridge the gap between Python 2 and 3. I haven't gotten into Python 3 yet so it's going to be a nice chance to make the leap.

HTML5 Canvas Gradients - Angular Gradient

In this part of the series I'm going to show you how to render angular gradient using HTML5 Canvas API. This is one of those gradients that's not covered by the API by default so it may come in handy. I will show a simplified version of the gradient and focus on the basics. It should be easy to extend on demand.